Canberra, Jun 27 (EFE).- WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange woke up Thursday as a free man after spending his first night in Australia, where he arrived a day earlier after pleading guilty to espionage before an overseas United States territory court.
Assange’s wife Stella Assange, called Wednesday night for “time” and “space” so that her husband can recover his health after 14 years of legal litigation in the United Kingdom, where he spent seven years sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy and five in a high security prison.
At a press conference in Canberra, Stella Assange also said the objective in the future would be, in the interest of press freedom, to pressure the US to reform the Espionage Act and apply a pardon to her husband.
The lawyers of the founder of WikiLeaks, which made public alleged US war crimes with the largest leak of confidential documents in this country, said they celebrated that Assange achieved his freedom, but that the case sets a dangerous precedent for press freedom.
One of his lawyers, Barry Pollock, said the Espionage Act prevailed over freedom of expression and information contained in the First Amendment in the US and that the hearing in the court of the American Northern Mariana Islands showed that the leaks did not harm anyone.
For years, US authorities and critics of the WikiLeaks founder have accused him of endangering informants and others by leaking tens of thousands of secret or sensitive documents and cables.
Assange landed at Canberra International Airport on a charter flight at about 7:40pm local time (9:40 GMT) on Wednesday, after a long trip that began Monday in London and led him to make a technical stop Tuesday in Bangkok before flying to the Northern Mariana Islands.
Assange’s freedom was possible after an agreement with the US Justice Department that was formalized Wednesday during a hearing in a court in Saipan,, in which he pleaded guilty to violating the law. of American espionage as part of the pact.
At the hearing, Judge Ramona Villagomez sentenced Assange to 62 months in prison, recognizing the time already served in the Belmarsh high-security prison in the UK, for which he was released.
This episode ends a 14-year saga that began in 2010 with the largest leak of classified documents in US history, with which WikiLeaks revealed attacks on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay prison, among other matters.
Initially detained in 2010 at the request of Sweden for a case of abuse that is now archived, Assange was in the middle of a complex extradition process to the US, where he had been accused of 18 crimes that carried a possible sentence of more than 170 years in prison. EFE
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